An Atomic Romance

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  “Don’t worry. We secure them.”

  Reed wrote fast on the form. He said, “I don’t remember seeing you here before. You must be new.”

  “I am new. One month and a day.”

  “Welcome to Atomic World,” Reed said.

  Later that afternoon, Reed dropped by the construction site to give Burl a ride home. In what was once a cornfield near the Interstate, a small plaza was in the works, and Burl had been packing dirt around the foundation with his Bobcat. The tank tread that covered the two left tires had been unhooked, and it lay flat on the ground. A young Mexican was unchinking clay mud from the tire treads.

  Burl, kicking a tire, said, “I plugged that leak this morning, but this ground is so heavy it blew out again.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “This is Santos. Reed, my buddy. Mi amigo.”

  “Glad to know you,” Reed said.

  Santos nodded shyly. “Nice to meet you,” he said slowly.

  Burl was showing Santos how to reattach the tank tread.

  “I’ll get in and back up and go real easy, and you roll the back tread up this way.” Burl demonstrated the plan. Then he climbed into the cab and inched the tires forward. Santos lifted the metal tread in back of the rear wheel and rolled it onto the surface of the tire until it was looped over the top. Burl got out of the cab, and together they pulled the tread over the front tire. The challenge was to hook the two ends of the tread together again, but because of the slack around the tires, the ends were still far apart—about eight inches.

  “Hand me the slack adjuster, Reed,” said Burl. “There in the back of the truck.”

  Reed handed Burl the tool, a yellow canvas belt that hooked onto each end of the tread. With an iron bar shaped like a duck foot, Burl was able to cinch the treads. He worked methodically, demonstrating the procedure to his helper. Reed observed the strength it took to tighten the belt.

  “Come here and give her a few turns, Reed,” Burl said.

  Reed seized the paddle and pulled. “Man, this is like milking bricks. You could get tennis elbow from this.”

  Burl explained tennis elbow to Santos, whose face lighted with recognition.

  After Reed gave the slack adjuster a few cranks, Santos took a turn, and then Burl tried again. Gradually, the two ends met—just barely, like God’s finger touching Adam’s on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Reed thought.

  Santos said, “Here it is. Now.” He inserted the bolt that held the two ends together.

  “Tighten it like this,” Burl said, showing Santos.

  Watching the men work moved Reed. The job seemed so straightforward, out in the open, without secrets. The work was safe—no sinister chemicals. Reed tried to study what was happening. Was he an observer or a participant? Did either Burl or Santos feel as though he was watching a movie?

  Reed found his mother in the lounge, staring at the odd fish in the vase of greenery. He helped her to her apartment and helped her lay out her oil paints. The silver-and-red balloons Shirley had sent for their mother’s return from the hospital still floated limply above the TV. He hadn’t talked to Shirley since, but he had kept her informed by e-mail, and she often called their mother.

  Reed had once sent a T-shirt with the words BALLOONS KILL BIRDS to Shirley, who ignored his environmental gesture. He couldn’t really nag her for promoting nonbiodegradable crap that was dangerous to animals, since he worked in the nuclear industry, where the half-life of the wicked leftovers lasted an eternity longer than a child’s balloon.

  “Balloons kill birds,” he said to his mother now, indicating the sagging bunch of balloons.

  “Slingshots,” his mother said.

  “That’s sharp.”

  She beamed brightly and reached for him to hug her.

  “You’re good to me,” she said.

  “I try.”

  “The food here is worse than the hospital food,” she said. “I don’t know how they expect to keep their customers.”

  “You liked the oyster stew I brought, didn’t you?” He had heated it in her microwave. She ate it with pleasure, exclaiming over the oyster crackers—“little biscuits,” she called them.

  “Oyster stew? I haven’t had oysters in thirty years.”

  Reed didn’t argue. He checked her air-conditioning; he thought the air blowing out was too cool for her, and he adjusted it.

  “You need to do some crossword puzzles to exercise your mind,” he said, patting her shoulder. “It’s like a muscle—use it or lose it!”

  “Am I losing my mind?”

  “I wouldn’t know. Have you been looking for it?”

  He suddenly remembered when she was a young widow. He had only flickers of memory of his father, a man with a ruddy complexion, reddish-blond hair, angular hands. He remembered him coming down the hall and setting a carton of ice cream on the table. A pair of jumper cables hung from his neck. Or perhaps it was a jump rope. Or a fishnet. A lasso.

  “Tell me about when you first got married, Ma,” Reed asked. “Did he open doors for you? Did you go to double features at the drive-in? Did you ever write any letters? When he got on at the plant at first, building it, what was his job? Did you all live nearby?”

  “Slow down!” she cried.

  “I’m exercising your mind,” he said. “Maybe you can just tell me if you remember if he worked on any recycling at the plant.”

  “Go ask Wes Thornbush,” his mother said. “You remember him.”

  “Thornhill,” he said.

  Leaving Sunnybank, Reed shook his head to clear it. It was like sneezing. The need to clear his mind was becoming a habit. His head was like one of those snow globes. He remembered Rosalyn telling about a Jesus snow globe she got in Branson, Missouri. But Reed, instead of hearing her say “Jesus,” heard “Cheez-Its.” For a while, he saw a startling image of little orange crackers falling through the globe instead of snow.

  27

  Weston Thornhill lived a few miles beyond the city limits, near a large apple orchard. When Reed was growing up, Thornhill and his wife used to drop by the house, sometimes bringing fruit from the orchard. Reed hadn’t seen his father’s friend in years.

  Thornhill was bent over in his garden—stooping at the feet of hollyhocks and sunflowers. He straightened, holding on to his hoe as an anchor, when Reed turned in the driveway. He stared questioningly as Reed emerged from his truck. A clump of weeds fell from his hand.

  “Reed Futrell, it’s about time you showed up here,” Wes Thornhill said in a thunderously welcoming voice. “Where in the world have you been all these years?” He pointed his hoe at Reed.

  “Your garden’s looking good, Mr. Thornhill. Your tomatoes are ripe and your beans could be Jack’s beanstalks.”

  Thornhill examined Reed. “You look more like Robert Futrell than he did himself!” he said as if he had just retrieved a quiz answer long stored in memory.

  “I’m Robert Futrell’s, all right,” Reed said, pleased.

  “Your daddy was a good one. Everybody liked him.”

  They sat down on two stumps under a canopy of oak trees behind the modest white dwelling. The tatterdemalion back porch overflowed with junk, and a makeshift awning sheltered more. Thornhill wiped his face with a wadded handkerchief he plucked from his shirt pocket. Reed noticed some small white splotches on the man’s cheeks. For a while, they caught up on general news. Thornhill had not heard about Reed’s mother’s stroke, but in the way of older people he seemed to take news of illness and decline in stride.

  “I’d offer you a beer if I had one,” Thornhill said. He was still clutching his hoe. “But I can’t drink fizzy drinks anymore.”

  “That’s O.K., Mr. Thornhill.”

  “How many hot spots do you have to step on to get through the parking lot nowadays? Are they getting that mess cleaned up?”

  “We don’t throw anything away,” Reed said with a grin. “It’s like people in Alaska. They just pile up their broken old snowmobiles and pre
tend it’s sculptures.” He was facing a rusty riding mower piled with plastic crates beneath the tilted awning.

  “That plant’s a poison pit,” the older man declared. “We breathed a lot of black dust.”

  “My uncle Ed always said that didn’t bother him.”

  “They said you could eat the stuff! But they also thought the work was dangerous enough to keep it top secret. Does that make sense?” He steadied himself with his hoe handle. “Back at the start, people didn’t know any better. Do you drink tap water?”

  “Well, I’ve been known to,” said Reed, thinking he was being offered a drink of water; there was a hose lying on the ground.

  “It’ll kill you,” Thornhill said. “It’s full of TCE—that’s as bad as anything. We used to crawl inside those big cylinders and wash them out with TCE. Tons of it drained into the groundwater.”

  “I know,” said Reed. “They were sloppy in the way they handled it.”

  “That stuff’s built up in the groundwater and killed the fish and all.”

  Reed poked at the bark on the stump, which was pressing his testicles. “Now we wash out the pipes with Formula 409 and Kool-Aid.” He laughed.

  “That TCE will kill you,” Thornhill repeated.

  “Mr. Thornhill, tell me, when you were there did you know about the transuranics?”

  He paused to think. “It’s funny. We were sworn to secrecy, but what the hell did we know? They said if word had leaked out, the Russians could have used the information. We weren’t smart enough to figure it out for ourselves, but the Russians would know. We were afraid to say anything, in case it might be something the Russians could use. Hell, do you think if I heard somebody telling a secret in Russian that I’d know what to do with it?” His laughter was bitter.

  “But did you know you were working with reactor tails?” Reed asked.

  “Oh, yeah. We did that. The shipments came in on the railroad cars, and we processed it. But we didn’t know how hot it really was. It was spent fuel rods, all ground up into black oxide.” He laughed. “We called the stuff ‘rat tails.’ ”

  “And what about warheads?”

  He nodded. “I remember those too. I remember when the bombs came in. They rolled them out on a huge cart, on tandem wheels.” He grinned. “The tandem wheels were nifty. I’d make toolboxes out of them. All the electric circuitry in the bombs was gold plated. The bomb had a parachute inside made out of mesh, and I made a hammock out of one.”

  Reed laughed with him. “I would have done the same thing.” He stretched out his right calf, pulling his toes toward him. His muscles were tight as fence wire. “Mr. Thornhill, you don’t really mean bombs, complete and ready to roll, do you?”

  “No. They’d been broken apart before they were shipped.”

  “They were old bombs that had been dismantled.”

  “Right. The shipments would come in the dead of night, and we’d unload them off of a conveyer belt and put them in a storage shed. It was all hush-hush. Then later on we’d strip down the gold and the nickel and the aluminum and some other stuff. We’d toss it all in the smelter.”

  “That must be where the nickel scrap came from that was going to be made into barbecue grills,” Reed said.

  “We didn’t know about anything radioactive in there; we weren’t told everything, just what they said we needed to know. But that’s where the beryllium came from, you know. The nose cones. Nobody said anything about plutonium though. The trigger had been taken out—”

  “The plutonium pit?”

  “Yeah. A hole was there. I don’t know what they did with all the triggers.”

  “The hole where they were must have had traces of plutonium,” Reed said. “That must be where the plutonium contamination came from.”

  “That’s what I figure,” said Thornhill, nodding.

  “They’re cranking up some old plants, like the one out in New Mexico, to fix up the worn-out triggers.”

  “Oh, yeah. I know all about that. I figure it’s just an excuse for making more bombs.”

  Thornhill repositioned himself on his stump seat. The hoe he had been holding fell to the ground, and he turned its blade downward. In his mind, Reed conjured up the stricken expression on Julia’s face if she heard this conversation.

  Hesitantly, he said, “The thing is—management has been good to us. But somebody along the line should have told us the truth.”

  “Hell, they were good to us then,” said Thornhill. “I don’t think they knew. Back then nobody really understood radiation.”

  Except moviemakers, Reed thought. Them. Godzilla. The Japanese knew.

  Thornhill said, “I knew back when your daddy died that it wasn’t good to work with that stuff. I stayed because I didn’t have much choice. I had three little ones and a wife who wanted too much. But I’d come home green and they’d all laugh. We had to get the kids not to tell that I was green at the supper table—but how could you expect a kid not to blab that? Of all things in the world, that’s what they’d want to tell. We told them if the Communists found out, they’d come and take away all their playthings. Oh, it was ridiculous.” He laughed. “I had the kids scared to say boo.”

  At Reed’s urging, Thornhill began to reminisce about the days when the plant was built and the atomic cloud was a popular symbol, appearing on everything from license plates to souvenir trinkets.

  “Oh, it was like Christmas and the circus all at once,” he said. “People were coming in from everywhere to build the plant. Apartment buildings were shooting up. People whipped out shacks in their backyards and rented them to workers. They rented out leantos and even chicken coops. It was a few years after the war and people here were still hurting pretty bad. When the plant opened, the President came and rode in a parade downtown. It was crowded with people from miles around.”

  “My mother used to tell about all that,” said Reed. “She said it was like Hollywood had come and taken over the place.”

  “You have to remember we hadn’t seen anything like it,” he said, his eyes gleaming. “We’d never seen tall apartment houses, and we’d never seen so much money and so many promises. And the President!” Thornhill stopped and shook his head. Flexing his age-spotted hands, he said, “I had skin cancer—in three places. But I reckon I’ll be all right.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about that, Mr. Thornhill.”

  “My wife died from breast cancer. My grandbaby was born still-dead. Had no idea. But you know, I carry on! Look at them hollyhocks. Did you ever see such a sight? I reckon I’ll keep on going, even if it’s for nothing more than a fucking hollyhock.”

  “Those are good-looking hollyhocks,” Reed said. The spikes of bright faces reminded him of a chorus line.

  “My wife loved them, so I carry on with them.”

  “I’m sorry about your wife,” Reed said. “I remember her.”

  Reed again inquired about his father. “Tell me what working there was like for him, Mr. Thornhill.”

  “We worked with liquid fluorine,” Thornhill said. “We knew that was dangerous. You could cut diamonds with it—if you had some diamonds.”

  “I’ve been burned by hydrofluoric acid,” said Reed, showing the puckered little hole on his wrist. “Boy, fluorine smokes.”

  “Well, then, you can imagine how bad your daddy’s accident was.” Thornhill paused to scrape something from his shoe. “I wasn’t there when it happened, but I know when the fluorine leaked he was working in a real tight place, and he couldn’t get out fast enough. Those fumes took him down. I believe he caught his foot on something.”

  “Stubbed his toe in the dark,” Reed said. “Damn.”

  Thornhill nodded. “You couldn’t see in that feed plant for the dust—except once in a while when a ball of fire rolled across the ceiling.” His face brightened. “The hydrogen collected up there and a spark would set it off. It would just roll right out the door and we’d go back to work. It might singe your hair a little.”

  Reed stretched h
is leg slowly, choosing words. “My mother always told me my dad was a hero of the Cold War,” he said. “She said he died in the service of his country.”

  Thornhill grunted. “And my boy died in Vietnam. He died in the service of his country. But nobody ever said he was a hero—except his mama and me.”

  A little breeze was making the hollyhocks tremble. Reed felt the hairs on his arms move in unison with them.

  28

  At the end of the week, Reed picked up the exposure records he had requested. The manila envelope lay on the passenger seat of his car unopened while he stopped for gas, lingering to chat with a couple of contractors Burl sometimes worked for. Rosalyn wasn’t there. Then he drove to a market for dog food and eggs. He came home, stowed the food, romped around the vacant lot with Clarence, drank a ginger ale.

  Testing was routine. Once a month he gave a urine sample, and at least twice a year during the eighties he lay on a table in the dark trailer of a mobile health-physics testing lab while a body counter, in the manner of space aliens examining abductees, trundled slowly over his flesh.

  He had seen these reports back then, but he had filed them away, and they had disappeared during his divorce. Now, at his kitchen table, he calmly considered the numbers under his bioassay analysis and his in vivo monitoring. His numbers were usually less than twenty-five percent of the radiation protection standards. He was “within range.” But in 1982, 1986, and 1987 the numbers had shot up. In later years, with the safety uprating, he hadn’t worried. He figured the numbers would average out.

  He remembered this one—1982. His urinalysis revealed twice the “safe” level of uranium. But the next year he was normal.

  He flipped to 1986, the year of the worst incident. Yellow dust and sirens. The body-counter numbers for uranium and technetium were approximately what he recalled—within limits. But 0.15 nanocuries of neptunium had slipped into his body. Then he saw the word plutonium.

  An air sample taken on-site contained an unusually high concentration of plutonium-239 and an equal concentration of neptunium-237.